Comment on Selfishness Signals Status

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 18:17:23 GMT

One issue I see is that the evidence on this is likely to be mostly anecdotal, rather than qualitative and carefully recorded under bias-mitigating conditions. But I'm willing to pursue the line of inquiry.

Expanding that list, you would assign low probability of scoring a gorgeous date to a poor, stupid, ugly dude no one has ever heard of and who can't pull rank on anyone.

Neither would I. So the surprising prediction, with this low prior, would be that such a person could systematically, by displaying specific behaviors, improve their chances above the base rate for someone similarly situated.

Can you give specific examples of single behaviors which have that effect? Or, if single behaviours do not reliably have that effect, a minimal set of distinct behaviors that do have that effect?

If these behaviors were to match up reliably (which I'm not sure how we'd measure, but set that aside for now) with behaviors independently predicted (say, from observation of primate behavior) to be found in dominant individuals in something like our EEA, that would convince me of a useful "status hypothesis".

It seems that we're heading into the PUA topic. I'm hoping we can do that in a reasonable way, i.e. without offending anyone. I promise to drop the thread if anyone feels offended, even at something someone else says. If that does happen I'll make amends by thinking seriously about why that happens.

An interesting observation is that the PUA community also refers often to the Keith Johnstone book as a "primary source" for their list of supposed high-status behaviors. (I'm guessing that's where Robin Hanson picked up the reference.) Johnstone's own inspiration was Desmond Morris of Naked Ape fame; at least that much is tracking for me. On the other hand, Johnstone himself is no scientist, but a drama instructor.

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